Pinball - Letters - Spacewar - Drive
Reviews Summary Your Computer Issue 4 Pinball, the first program on the last cassette, is an Atom version of the American form of the game. It gives continuous score display and lets you waggle the flippers to try to keep the ball in play. Spacewar is far more addictive. It is a kind of kamikaze Invaders with super, low-level graphics and sound. Even the easiest of the 10 play levels is tough - this is a great game for the adrenal gland. The "end of the Universe as we know it is most impressive. Crash is a drive-along-the-road-hitting-these-blocks-but-missing-those kind of game. Only one level - and it is not an easy one, though the low-level graphics restrict excitement. Finally, there is Letters - I have seen the same game called Tank. You must drive inside a square at a speed of 1-10, hitting the displayed letters in order. Failure is hitting the wrong letter or the sides of the square. This is surprisingly addictive. C+VG Issue 4 Spacewar brings the alien invad ers back to your screen but puts them behind a wall. This cross between Space Invaders and Breakout has kamikaze alien spaceships trying to knock bricks out of a wall which it is up to you to defend. Every 1,500 points a new barrier magically appears to replace the old battered one. Your resources amount to five laser bases, which seem pretty meagre when compared to the alien commander, who has 400 craft at his disposal. If you manage to destroy all the aliens a message appears telling you what a hero you are. But there is one small bug in the program, when the last base has been destroyed the firing sound effect still continues whenever you press the fire key. On the same Acorn Atom cassette is Pinball, a version which is the best I have yet seen on a computer. The game uses low resolution graphics and needs 5K of text space memory, so it will run on a semi-expanded Atom. In this version of Pinball, the table has been put on its side so that the flippers are on the left hand side of the screen rather than at the bottom. This makes the game slightly more difficult to master if you are used to playing on normal pinball machines but you should soon get used to it. The game becomes very fast moving and a great amount of skill and concentration is required to get a good score. You are allowed up to nine balls with which to try to get up to 999,990 (you'll never do it) although a score of about 100,000 is quite reasonable. Neither of these games need a floating point ROM. On the same cassette but more disappointing are, Drive and Letters which make up the four games. Still at only £5 from Timedata I would strongly recommend this casssette to all Acorn Atom users. Category:Atom Games Category:Timedata Category:Your Computer Reviews Category:C+VG Reviews